We're building AI agents for collaborative intelligence, starting with an RFP and Questionnaire automation platform.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Arphie has raised a seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Definition, Recall Capital, and angel investors to fuel our vision of creating a new category in the enterprise B2B software space: Collaborative Intelligence.
We believe that the way businesses collaborate—both externally with other organizations, and internally within their teams—is ripe for a paradigm shift, starting with RFPs and complex questionnaires.
According to industry research, nearly half of all companies lose more than $1m in revenue every year due to incomplete RFPs, driven by information living in disparate sources, and inefficient processes for collaboration. Surveys also show that teams on average submit 175 RFPs each year, and spend an average of 30 hours on each RFP.
The problem of responding to RFPs and other B2B questionnaires is one that the Arphie team has personally experienced through countless nights and weekends. Dean Shu, CEO and co-founder of Arphie, was frequently pulled into RFPs during his time as a business unit leader at Scale AI for large prospects in financial services and healthcare, industries notorious for their RFP-heavy sales processes.
Meanwhile, Michael Chen, CTO and co-founder of Arphie, previously led infrastructure teams at Asana and Palantir, and often was pulled into high urgency RFPs processes as the companies looked to expand into questionnaire-heavy geographies.
These experiences made it clear that RFPs and questionnaires were a universal shared pain across industries and functions.
So we decided to do something about it. Arphie reimagines the questionnaire process through its Collaborative Intelligence platform by deploying AI agents to streamline the frustrating – but critical – work of putting together RFP and questionnaire responses. Arphie has helped teams tackle these questionnaires faster, with fewer headaches, and with better results – shortening processes that previously took weeks into days, and days into minutes, enabling pursuit of more revenue opportunities.
Drawing upon prior experience building AI products at Scale AI, Palantir, Asana, and Microsoft, the Arphie team built a platform that uses AI agents to pull together disparate (often unstructured) internal sources for a first draft response, and collaborate with other team members to improve answers.
Customer teams can seamlessly connect internal and external product documentation, marketing and sales materials, competitor battlecards, prior RFP responses, and more to the Arphie platform. Arphie then uses a proprietary agent-based approach to ingest, categorize, and write first-draft responses, resulting in significantly better performance than traditional keyword-based RFP automation software, as well higher quality retrieval and response construction than typical Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches.
As we started working with customers and industry experts, we saw a clear and universal need to overhaul the B2B questionnaire response process.
Arphie customers hail from industries ranging from GTM teams in software companies, financial services, as well as traditional industries such as construction.
“Switching to Arphie has profoundly transformed our SE team's operations. Their innovative AI-native approach to knowledge management and questionnaire completion has significantly reduced process times, allowing us to accomplish tasks in just a few hours that previously took days. The Arphie team's technical expertise and hands-on collaboration have led to rapid advancements in their platform,” says Julian Kanitz, a Sales Engineering leader at Recorded Future.
Recorded Future was acquired by Mastercard for $2.65 billion in September 2024.
This need also spans companies of all stages and maturity. Arphie is trusted by teams ranging from Series B startups to publicly traded companies.
“After evaluating numerous tools to streamline our RFP and security questionnaire processes, we found that Arphie stood out in every way. It’s super helpful for both our solutions engineers and security team, and the Arphie team is just awesome—sharp, responsive, and open to feedback. We’re genuinely happy with it; it saves us a ton of time and has become a real asset in our daily work,” says Steve Hackney, Head of Customer Solutions and Services at Front.
Front, a B2B software company valued at $1.7B, had evaluated four RFP automation platforms before purchasing Arphie’s platform.
As Arphie grows, security and customer trust remains a critical foundation to our platform. We earned SOC 2 Type 2 compliance less than a year into our founding journey.
Our customers trust us with proprietary and sensitive information, so we established our philosophy from the beginning: we will never use a customer’s data to improve other customers’ responses.
We’ve also established Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements with our AI model providers, to give our customers additional peace of mind.
While we’ve seen great traction with our initial product to streamline RFPs and questionnaires, our vision for Collaborative Intelligence goes far beyond this initial problem. We’re already working with customers and prospects about exciting adjacent challenges in B2B collaboration they’d like us to tackle — challenges that we’re well-positioned to solve given the data and insights they’ve already trusted us with.
This is just the beginning. We’re excited about the road ahead and couldn’t be more grateful for the support of our investors, customers, and team. We look forward to sharing more as we continue to innovate and transform how businesses collaborate.
If you are looking to streamline your RFP or questionnaire response process – please reach out to us at hello@arphie.ai, or Contact Us.
If you’re excited about what we’re building, we’re hiring across engineering and sales – please visit Careers.
